ON THE DISI»OSAL OF THE DEAD. 
169 
and the removal of the contents of these grounds, though it 
has often been made, is one of those arguments that would 
require a great deal of new fact before it could be accepted as 
reliable. In our time, certainly, no fair instance of this evil has 
been revealed in our country ; nor is there the remotest reason 
to assume that the organic poisons of the spreading diseases are 
so indestructible that they will remain undecomposed while 
the other organic parts resolve into gaseous products of decom- 
position. 
Indeed, except by direct inoculation from it, it does not 
appear, in evidence, that even the recent dead body, dead of a 
contagious malady, is capable of communicating contagion to 
the living. The motion of life is necessary for the poisonous 
particle to be disseminated that it may light disease. The 
dead body, like a candle that has been perfectly extinguished 
and then ceases to give forth the light which, before it was 
extinguished, it could so readily communicate to other bodies 
that are capable of burning, is harmless when it has ceased to 
glow. And so, when we carefully investigate this question, 
the danger arising from the dead who have died of contagious 
maladies, we find amongst those who are engaged in moving 
such dead for burial — the undertakers and their assistants — no 
instance of the origin of any contagious malady as a conse- 
quence of the exercise of their particular calling. On this ground 
of assumed danger from burial there is in fact no necessary case. 
The last objection to the mode of disposal of the dead by 
burial in the earth, though it seems at first the most cogent, is 
practically unreal. It is so natural an act to bury what is 
dead, that the thought of the after changes to which the buried 
body is subjected never troubles the minds of those who live. 
There is something about it that cannot enter into the mind to 
terrify it. Claudius himself, with death in his face, though he 
thinks it terrible 44 to lie in cold obstruction and to rot,” 44 his 
sensible warm motion to became a kneaded clod,” shrinks less 
from this apprehension than from that of the delighted spirit 
bathing in fiery floods or residing in thrilling regions of thick- 
ribbed ice, or a worse than worst, to be with those that 44 law- 
less and uncertain thoughts imagine howling.” The same with 
the few of his class. The majority, like Diogenes, rather than 
Claudius, think nothing of the disposal of their inanimate 
bodies. What matters it , 44 nihil sentienti ” ? For the like 
reason those who live to bury their dead have no sense of after 
disgust in the fact. They go to the grave, plant it with 
flowers, or cover it with the monumental stone, and speak and 
think of the sleeper beneath with no sentiments save those of 
love and sorrow, and the reason of this is that they are at one 
with nature. The earth calls for the dead, that she may bring 
